Theology and Church

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Karl Barth. Theology and Church

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THEOLOGY AND CHURCH

SHORTER WRITINGS 1920–1928

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If we look back at these three aspects of Barth’s understanding of the self-revelation of God through his Word, and ask what he means by theology, we must say that for him theology is a thinking from a centre in God, deriving from his active communication of himself in the form of personal Being and Truth, and pointing back to him as the goal of all true human thinking and knowing. While theology necessarily involves two poles of thought, God and man, for it is man who thinks and man who knows, it is not a thinking and knowing from a centre in man himself but from a centre in God. It is man’s objective thinking of a Truth that is independent of him and is yet communicated to him. Theology is correct and true thinking when its movement corresponds to the movement of the Truth itself, and is a thinking in accordance with it, a thinking that follows its activity, thinking that is obedient to its proper object, the Lord God.

We may say, then, that theo-logy is logos of God in a threefold sense of logos. Primarily we are concerned here with the Logos of God that is his own eternal Word and Son, the ground and source of all our human thinking and knowing. But this Logos has become flesh in Jesus Christ, for in him God has revealed and communicated himself to us within the objectivities of our existence in time and space, in creaturely and historical being, and hence in Jesus Christ God has objectified himself for us and given himself to our knowing and understanding. Yet Logos, in this second sense as the object of our knowing, remains the Lord, indissolubly Subject, who encounters us as Truth to be known only in so far as he encounters us as the very Being of God in Person; who meets us within the objectivities of our world which he has assumed for his self-revealing in Jesus Christ, in such a way that he remains the Lord, transcendent to all these objectivities, so objective that we can never master him in his objectivity and subdue him to some form of our own subjectivity in knowing or understanding him, but can only know him as we serve him and are obedient to the Truth. But theology includes a third sense of logos, in which it refers to our way of knowing and understanding the Truth of God in accordance with the way in which he has objectified himself for us in Jesus Christ. Thus theology is an activity of our reason in accordance with the nature of its proper object, God-in-his-Word, or God-in-his-revelation, in Jesus Christ. Theology is critical and positive activity in which we build up our knowledge of God from his Word which he gives as the object of our knowledge, and in which we test our knowing to make sure, as far as we can, that our noetic logos corresponds to the ontic logos in that Word. Thus theology operates with a mode of rationality that is required of us from the side of the object, and proceeds positively and critically in accordance with the way that the Word has taken in his self-communication to us.

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